28/11/2010

For the second part of the Newspaper project we were asked to create a publication, relating to part one in topic. I wanted to move away from the drawings I had been making and do something challenging, and outside of the confines of my desk! As I was working with a theme of propaganda it seemed only natural build something in the outside world; something large-scale and dramatic.

I chose to use the words of someone who had a greater understanding on the subject than myself - Jang Jin-Sung, a North Korean who had worked for Kim Il-Sung before successfully fleeing his regime to the south. Few have survived these attempts, and when Jang Jin-Sung succeeded his poetry on the experiences of his homeland became well known throughout South Korea.

This particular poem of his uses light & darkness as a metaphor for hope for the people of North Korea. This, teamed with the knowledge that North Korea is completely black when viewed from a satellite at night due the the economic crisis, led me to design this piece. The type is supposed to seem like a satellite image of a city at night, but it also looks a bit like fireflies - which I quite like because they are mentioned in the poem.

For our first project this year we had to design a 20 page A2 size newspaper. We were asked to research current stories from a range of newspapers and choose one topic or story and style/stance to base our own on. Much publicised that week was Kim Jong Il's son's introduction to North Korea as their future leader. After further reading and watchingthe unsettling documentary Welcome to Korea I decided to base my entire newspaper on the subject.
I produced naive, hand-rendered drawings to highlight the ridiculousness of this shambolic pantomime-government, in the gritty realism of black & white.
I'll put some images of the final designed newspaper up soon, still have some further work to do on them at the moment.

07/11/2010

For this project we were given a list of nouns, verbs and adjectives from which we had to choose one from each category. We then had to devise a story and illustrate it in eight images - four from an insider's perspective, four from an outsider's perspective. I had to ask Netta to choose mine for me as I am too indecisive! She chose television, space oddity and cutting... these are the results.

06/11/2010

I took these photographs in Japan over the summer, at the famous Mijajima torii which stands in the water on the bay. We happened to visit at low tide, which meant we were able to walk up to it, touch it, and view it up close in it's dry and unconcealed state. Mostly it was crusted with barnacles and green slime, but the rich colours and peeling textures of this surface caught my eye. To me these photographs look uncannily like oil paintings, bringing new meaning to the phrase 'painting with light'.